-
RSS and Updates
Forthcoming
Small Beer Press
150 Pleasant St., #306
Easthampton, MA 01027
413-203-1636
[email protected]Tweets
Tweets from @michaeljdeluca/sbp-authors
Sign up for our somewhat occasional Email List
The River Bank
Preorder
Kij Johnson September 2017 A sequel to Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows
Telling the Map
Preorder
Christopher Rowe July 11, 2017 Stories that sometimes begin in the hills of Kentucky and head out into complicated and sometimes hopeful futures.
Ambiguity Machines
Preorder
Vandana Singh February 13, 2018 A book of stories about the uncertainty with which we move through space and time, by ourselves and with others.
Current BooksCurrent Zine
-
Tender
Sofia Samatar“These stories are windows into an impressively deep imagination guided by sensitivity, joyful intellect, and a graceful mastery of language.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
-
The Bodies of the Ancients
Lydia Millet“Children, adults, and myriad creatures fight the final battle in a war over climate changey…. relationships are tender. Memorably unusual.”
— Kirkus Reviews -
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 35
History is written by the people who write.
We will fight for equality, inclusiveness, for health care.
We will fight racism, misogyny, hatred, and intolerance.
We will write the history of our times together.
Chuntering On and On
-
Skillfully Reinventing Familiar Narratives Fri 16 Jun 2017
It’s what Christopher Rowe has been doing for lo these some years now and soon enough there in every bookstore in the nation will be his collection of stories and those familiar but reinvented narratives will be spreading like wildfire. The week of publication will be celebrated throughout Kentucky but specifically in the author’s hometown […]
-
LCRW 36 cover illustration Mon 5 Jun 2017
We’re working on LCRW 36 and I just love this cover, “I Was Raised By The Forest” by kAt Philbin, so much I had to post it. (Get LCRW delivered just for you.)
-
Get Your Hands on In Other Lands Fri 2 Jun 2017
Goodreads Book Giveaway In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan Giveaway ends June 10, 2017. See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter Giveaway
Latest Eruption of Fiction Into the Universe
Tender
trade cloth · 288 pages · $24 · 9781618731265 | ebook · 9781618731272
Divided into “Tender Bodies” and “Tender Landscapes,” these twenty stories travel from the commonplace to the edges of reality.
The first collection of short fiction from a rising star whose stories have been anthologized many times including in the first two volumes of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series and nominated for many awards. Some of Samatar’s weird and compassionate fabulations spring from her life and literary studies; some spring from the world, some from the void. Tender explores the fragility of bodies, emotions, and landscapes, in settings that range from medieval Egypt to colonial Kenya to the stars, and the voices of those who question: children, students, servants, researchers, writers.
Tender includes two new stories, “An Account of the Land of Witches” and an expansive novella, “Fallow.”
New
Interview and Podcast: Sofia Samatar’s Arabian Fantasies Get Dosed in Reality
Pain Is the Heaviest Thing: The Many Meanings of Tender by Sofia Samatar Reviewed by Sara Rauch
“On top of all that Tender has going for it, the poetry of Samatar’s language fairly sings off the page. Tender begs to be read out loud . . . ”
Read an excerpt from Fallow introduced by Chris Abani.
Sofia Samatar, Five Elegant and Moody Fantasies
Just up on Lithub, a phenomenal heartbreaking story from Sofia Samatar, Meet Me in Iram — first published as a chapbook by Guillotine and selected for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Read a new story from Tender on The Offing: An Account of the Land of Witches
Events
June 23, 1:30 p.m. Crossing the Line: Women of Anabaptist Traditions Encounter Borders and Boundaries
Plenary Talk, Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA
Reviews
Ilana Teitelbaum, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A relentless, challenging, and hypnotic collection, Sofia Samatar’s Tender transports the reader to myriad worlds, periods of history, and monstrous futures yet to be born. It can be a difficult text, demanding a high level of engagement with multiple layers and themes. At the same time, its subtle yet wrenching emotions have a way of getting under your skin.”
Jason Heller, NPR:
“Tender‘s longest story is also a science fiction tale set in the future — and like ‘The Red Thread,’ it toys with the ambiguity between dystopia and utopia. Told from the perspective of a child named Agar Black Hat, who lives in an extraterrestrial colony after cataclysmic climate change and a universal draft have forced a sect of religious pacifists from Earth, the story is a feast of ideas. It’s reminiscent of vintage Ursula K. Le Guin in its combination of social science and hard sci-fi, even as it probes the nature of belonging and belief.
“The book’s beating heart, though, is its title story. ‘Tender’ starts out with a clever play on words — ‘tender’ is used as a noun, as in, one who tends — and employs some tricky unreliable narration and splintered points-of-view. But Samatar’s virtuoso flourishes of form serve a higher purpose: They couch a quietly devastating account of a woman who gave up her life as a career woman and mother to become a cyborg, one who, alone, tends to a radioactive waste facility which she may never leave. While Samatar slowly unspools her character’s reasons for leaving her former life — delivering a primer on the haunting philosophies and damaged psyches of the scientists who gave us nuclear power along the way — ‘Tender’ redefines the emotional power and literary heft that speculative fiction can convey. As does Tender as a whole.”
Brit Mandelo, Tor.com:
“I was also impressed with both of the pieces original to this collection. . . . ‘Fallow’ is the second original piece, a novella, and is by far the longest in the collection. It’s also the best novella I’ve read in quite some time. . . . a heady mix of science and grim hard-scrabble religious life in a dystopic and closeknit society. . . . I’d strongly recommend giving the literary, clever, and productive art that Samatar has collected here a read. It’s as good as I’d hoped, and just as smart too.”
7 Standout SFF Short Story Collections to Start Your Summer
“Sofia Samatar has made a name for herself as a fabulist with two critically acclaimed novels and numerous short works. Tender collects many of her shorter endeavors, from a field guide to ogres in Africa, to a story of young women experiencing an unusual event at summer camp, to one of a sapient brass automata’s father-daughter relationship with her creator. While, like all good fabulists, Samatar’s lyricism and atmosphere are pitch perfect, it is her unique grasp of character voices that puts Tender in the top tier.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review):
“These stories are windows into an impressively deep imagination guided by sensitivity, joyful intellect, and a graceful mastery of language.”
adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood:
“Sofia Samatar’s stories are just so good. Surprising. Suspenseful at an emotional level — I kept finding myself plummeted into an emotion face first, everything built up so steadily, with such subtle and meticulous storytelling. Samatar earns readers’ trust and uses it to take us into unexpected territory, to make us see ourselves in our power, in our messiness. Tender is the right word, so many of these stories touched into the place of gasping, or tears. Each story had me like, “Oh this is my favorite, I must mention this one.” But then I would read the next story which would be Another Whole Paradigm, similar only in that the writing was astonishing, each word so precise. This collection is an exquisite exploration of what otherness and belonging and place and language and love do to us all. It is visionary fiction. Please accept this as my enthusiastic recommendation to let this book have its way with you.”
Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls:
“Equal parts brutal and beautiful, flinty, and acrobatic, Samatar’s stories explore lesser known territories of the imagination. The results chime with all the strangeness of dream and the dark-hearted truth of fairytale. I loved it.”
Ben Loory, Tales of Flying and Falling
“If a library came alive, and spent ten thousand years walking up and down upon the earth, exploring and dreaming and falling in and out of love, it might write stories like these.”
David Connerley Nahm author of Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky:
“The stories in Sofia Samatar’s Tender are perfect and profound works of art written with the impossible ease of someone who has unlimited access to the secret knowledge of the exact right order in which words are supposed to go. The stories ring in sympathy with the reader like the favorite stories of childhood or youth or old age: Familiar and strange in the same proportion. These stories give you several new lives to live and with each reading–because you will read all of them several times–you discover new tales and new possibilities hidden within and you are filled endlessly with the pure pleasure of great literature.”
Publishers Weekly:
“The first collection from one of fantasy’s rising stars, showcasing her rich, lyrical language and intricate storytelling in 20 short works.”
Table of Contents
Tender Bodies
Selkie Stories Are for Losers
Ogres of East Africa
Walkdog
The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle
Olimpia’s Ghost
Honey Bear
How I Met the Ghoul
Those
A Girl Who Comes Out of a Chamber at Regular Intervals
How to Get Back to the Forest
Tender Landscapes
Tender
A Brief History of Nonduality Studies
Dawn and the Maiden
Cities of Emerald, Deserts of Gold
An Account of the Land of Witches
Request for an Extension on the Clarity
Meet Me in Iram
The Closest Thing to Animals
Fallow
The Red Thread
Praise for Sofia Samatar’s Books
“The excerpt from Sofia Samatar’s compelling novel A Stranger in Olondria should be enough to make you run out and buy the book. Just don’t overlook her short “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” the best story about loss and love and selkies I’ve read in years.” —K. Tempest Bradford, NPR
“An imaginative, poetic, and dark meditation on how history gets made.” —Hello Beautiful
“Pleasantly startling and unexpected. Her prose is by turns sharp and sumptuous, and always perfectly controlled. . . . There are strains here too of Jane Austen and something wilder.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Samatar’s use of poetic yet unpretentious language makes her one of the best writers of today.” —Romantic Times Book Reviews (4.5/5 stars, Top Pick)
“If you love stories but distrust them, if you love language and can also see how it is used as a tool or a weapon in the maintenance of status quo, then read The Winged Histories.”
— Marion Deeds, Fantasy Literature
“Like an alchemist, Sofia Samatar spins golden landscapes and dazzling sentences.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
“Beauty, wonder, and a soaring paean to the power of story.”—Jason Heller, NPR
“Highly recommended.” —N. K. Jemisin, New York Times Book Review
Previously
February 8 – 11, AWP Conference, Washington, DC
February 9, 10:30 a.m., Book signing, Small Beer Press table, Bookfair
February 11, 4:30 – 5:45 p.m., Panel: “The Short Story as Laboratory,” Marquis Salon 9 & 10, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Two
March 24, 6:00 — 7:30 p.m., Virginia Festival of the Book, Panel: “Building (and Breaking) Worlds in Contemporary Science Fiction & Fantasy,” Central JMRL Library, Charlottesville, VA
May 18 – 21, Festival les Imaginales, Épinal, France
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories. She has written for the New Inquiry, Strange Horizons, and Clarkesworld, among others, and has won the John W. Campbell Award, the Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She lives in Virginia.
More Books
< Less Books-
Best Worst American
Juan Martinez“In his idiosyncratic approach to fiction, Martinez delivers truly new ways to read the world.” — Booklist
-
The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz
John Crowley“Crowley and his collaborators have successfully mixed together disparate elements to create a strange literary concoction that fizzes with creative energy.”
— Michael Berry, Portland Press Herald -
Words Are My Matter
Ursula K. Le Guin“In fact, it was the mainstream that ended up transformed.”
— The New Yorker -
A Natural History of Hell
Jeffrey Ford“Seamlessly blends subtle psychological horror with a mix of literary history, folklore, and SF.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
The People in the Castle
Joan AikenOne day a few years from now you’ll be busy with something and these stories will come back to you.
-
The Winged Histories
Sofia SamatarWho wields the pen? A new novel from the award-winning author of A Stranger in Olondria.
-
You Have Never Been Here
Mary Rickert“Beautiful, descriptive prose enriches tales of ghosts, loss, and regret in this leisurely collection.”— Publishers Weekly
-
The Entropy of Bones
Ayize Jama-Everett“Rooted in Chabi’s voice, the story is spare, fierce, and rich.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
Prodigies
Angélica Gorodischer“If you are ready for the experience of Prodigies, it is definitely ready for you.”
— Carmen Maria Machado, NPR -
Was: a novel
Geoff Ryman“In an era of bright, simple adaptations, Was is different—melancholy, beautiful, and yes, full of heartaches and nightmares.”
—Slate -
The Liminal War
Ayize Jama-Everett“Jama-Everett has a knack for braiding issues of spirituality and race throughout a compelling fantasy landscape.”— Leilani Clark, KQED
-
Archivist Wasp
Nicole Kornher-Stace“A ravishing, profane, and bittersweet post-apocalyptic bildungsroman transcends genre into myth.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales
Greer Gilman“Sublimely lyrical Jacobeanesque dialect . . . readers who enjoy
symbolism and allusion will cherish Gilman’s use of diverse folkloric elements to create an unforgettable realm and ideology.” —Publishers Weekly -
Young Woman in a Garden: Stories
Delia Sherman“Lightly flecked with fantasy and anchored in vividly detailed settings.” — Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year
-
Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams: Stories
Ysabeau S. Wilce“Califa: riotous carnival world of soldiers, drunks and magick.”— Kirkus Reviews
-
Exit, Pursued By a Bear
Greer GilmanBen Jonson has written the part of a lifetime for the Prince of Wales: he will play Oberon, the King of Faerie. It’s only theater. What could go wrong?
-
Sherwood Nation
Benjamin ParzybokIt was morning and the power was not yet on. Zach and Renee lay in the heat of the bed listening to the city wake outside the building’s windows.
-
Monstrous Affections
Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant, EditorsWorld Fantasy Award winner
-
Earth Logic
Laurie J. Marks“Glows with intelligence . . . though not for the faint of heart.”
—Booklist (starred review) -
A Summer in the Twenties
Peter DickinsonA young man has to choose who to love, who to leave in the 1926 General Strike in Britain.
-
Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction, 1989-2003
Howard Waldrop“Waldrop is probably the single most remarkable writer I know of who non-genre readers remain largely unfamiliar with.”—William Gibson
-
Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader: Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005
Howard Waldrop“Howard Waldrop is the Studebaker Golden Hawk of genre fiction, a classic of structure and design. His unique stories autopsy the entrails of our eccentric past and reveal, often in oracular fashion, insanities to come.” — Lucius Shepard
-
Questionable Practices
Eileen Gunn“Combines humor and compassion in 17 short, intricate gems.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
Emma Tupper’s Diary
Peter Dickinson“Loch Ness’s claims pale beside the super-exciting discovery made by Emma . . Expert mystification, the tender conscience and burning courage of the young, tantalising details, make this a compelling tall story.”
—Sunday Times